GIS AT GEORGETOWN

This report was funded through the Georgetown Global Cities Initiative and was completed in collaboration with the Massive Data Institute at the McCourt School of Public Policy. The report was researched and written by Izzy Youngs and Uwe Brandes. 

We want to extend a special thanks to the following contributors and interviewees for their insights and support:

• Douglas Howard
• Erik Wood
• Joshua Murphy
• Katalyn Anne Voss
• Mark Giordano
• Mark Winek
• Megan Martinsen
• Michael Bailey
• Peter Marra
• Rajesh Veeraraghavan
• Tim Frazier

In recent years, the Georgetown Global Cities Initiative has identified spatial analysis as a key area of capacity development for urban research at Georgetown. Concurrently, the Georgetown Massive Data Institute has become the central hub for advanced research leveraging big data at Georgetown. In order to better understand how to increase GIS adoption on campus, the Georgetown Global Cities Initiative is collaborating with the Massive Data Institute to develop this assessment of Georgetown’s current resources. 

This report is based on structured interviews and surveys with faculty and staff across the university and received responses from 11 different departments and initiatives. Existing software, training, and courses were documented, and opportunities for expanding student engagement, leveraging staff and financial resources, and supporting the Georgetown research community were assembled. Potential obstacles to expansion of GIS across campus were assessed, and other universities’ and institutions’ GIS programs were explored. Finally, a list of strategic recommendations based on this assessment were developed.

The central finding of this report is that Georgetown University lags far behind other R-1 universities in GIS technology adoption. Perhaps due to the lack of a dedicated department of geography, research at Georgetown has not leveraged the methodologies associated with spatial analysis. At the same time, there are numerous enthusiastic “green shoots'' of interest and practice utilizing the technology. Finally, many Georgetown students are deeply aware of the significance of spatial analysis in the broader context of the explosion of big data and the career opportunities enabled by geospatial research skills.

Geographic Information Systems (“GIS”) link data to location. Across disciplines and industries at every scale, decisions are made and outcomes are tracked using an increasing volume of data that is “geo-coded” or linked to a particular geographic location. For example, local government officials who have to manage complex and timely  vaccine distribution  and measure  health disparities  across their populations, do so in a manner which is geographically indexed to the places where those challenges are specifically expressed. 

Geographic information systems (GIS) enable data managers, data researchers and decision makers to introduce geographic location into their data analysis. Governments and research universities are using GIS to develop  web-based mapping visualizations  to communicate trends and offer more transparency. GIS has caused an enormous disruption in traditional research methodologies, and economists have used spatial analysis to  expose how location impacts economic opportunity  and contributes to social inequality. Biologists and environmental scientists use GIS to track  animal migration patterns ,  global climate change , and  deforestation . GIS is a  multi-billion dollar sector of the US economy  and an important tool across sectors and institutions. 

For decades, GIS software was obscure and difficult to adopt and scale due to demanding hardware and software requirements and the prohibitive cost of acquiring data and managing the technology. The recent explosion in accessible, geo-coded data and the scalability of cloud computing has shifted the landscape of spatial research and analytics. In recent years, the barriers to access GIS analysis capacity have been lowered, and GIS is now the engine behind spatial expression of demographic data and an explosion in applications in spatial asset management and systems mapping. Of critical importance to students and researchers is the fact that myriad spatial data sets are now easily accessed and the software is easy to use and manage.

GIS is a massive field of research and practice, particularly in Washington, DC, where Federal agencies and departments such as the Department of Defense, NASA, NOAA, USGS, the Census Bureau, the National Park Service, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Army Corps of Engineers and intelligence agencies all require a workforce which can utilize GIS to spatially analyze and spatially allocate resources efficiently and effectively. Federal contractors such as Deloitte, Accenture, AECOM, Booz Allen Hamilton and others also require GIS analysts to conduct research and provide consulting services. Think tanks and nonprofit organizations such as National Geographic, the Smithsonian, and Conservation International require a workforce which can analyze and track climate and changes to the environment. 

In addition, local and state governments around the world now require staff to manage and produce spatial analysis to plan housing, transportation systems, and other public infrastructure. Geospatial workforce occupations are classified by both the  BLS Standard Occupational Classifications  as well as the  OPM Federal Occupational Series Codes , and according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

Washington, DC has one of the largest workforce concentrations of GIS analysts in the country. The average national salary of a GIS analyst is $68k; in Washington, DC, the median salary is well above the national rate at $97k a year. Employers in the Washington, DC metropolitan area are often looking for employees with experience in vector and raster spatial analysis, and software and coding skills in Esri ArcGIS, QGIS, ERDAS Imagine, or eCognition software, as well as experience with programming in Python, SQL, or R. They often require that applicants be familiar with online mapping libraries and datasets, such as Mapbox, OpenStreetMap, and Google Earth Engine. 

Despite the increased accessibility of GIS, the Federal Geographic Data Committee, a national group of geospatial professionals responsible for providing advice and recommendations related to the management of Federal and national geospatial programs, reports that geospatial technology and research  faces serious workforce development challenges . They highlight that there is a shortage of qualified and skilled workers and urge that efforts must be made across government, the private sector, professional associations, and the academic community to prepare the workforce for new geospatial job opportunities. Spatial analysis is a critical research and professional skill set with growing demand from employers in government, private sector, and non-profit sectors, as spatial data becomes more and more ubiquitous.

Georgetown University’s primary resources enabling GIS research are provided through and managed by Lauinger Library’s Digital Scholarship initiative. The library provides access to a variety of GIS software, including Esri ArcGIS Desktop, Google Earth Pro, ERDAS Imagine, and QGIS through library workstations, and Esri ArcGIS Pro software is available to all members of the Georgetown community through the library’s new  Nutanix Frame  and for free personal download through the  university webstore . 

The library offers several  workshops  throughout the semester for students and faculty who want to learn more about GIS and mapping, and the Digital Scholarship librarian offers introductory and intermediate-level consultations to students and faculty. The library collects and maintains registration data for all of its workshops, and after moving to virtual workshops over the course of the past year, the Library observed a tenfold increase in workshop attendance. 

From summer 2020 until February 2021, the library served over 650 students and over 240 faculty and staff in 12 workshops for an average of over 76 attendees per workshop. The most popular workshops were Tableau Maps, Intro to Digital Maps, and Esri ArcGIS Online. Graduate students were more than twice as likely as staff, faculty, and undergraduates to attend a library workshop, and the top ten programs in attendance were*:

1. Foreign Service
2. Business Administration
3. Public Policy
4. Security Studies
5. History
6. Emergency and Disaster Management
7. Government
8. Science, Technology, and International Affairs
9. Global Human Development
10. Applied Intelligence

*This may reflect the size of these programs more than the demand within programs. These counts are not compared to the total program size. Also, certain programs such as the Urban & Regional Planning program at SCS have already incorporated GIS skills training into their curriculum and are thus not represented here.

Through interviews with stakeholders, we discovered that while the library is an invaluable resource for learning about GIS, spatial data, and mapping, the library also represents a constrained resource. Currently there is only one Digital Scholarship librarian whose job responsibilities are to consult and assist on GIS projects and two additional library staff members with some knowledge of GIS. There is no centralized GIS help center or tutoring service. The library also assists in managing certain software licenses and  supports additional non-proprietary tools , but these resources are not well-advertised across departments and schools. 

There are also misconceptions about the cost of software, which directly affect the utilization of the existing resources. Some stakeholders reported that they believed there was a financial obstacle for either the student or university in downloading Esri ArcGIS software, but that is not the case under the university’s current license agreement with Esri. 

There are also additional holdovers from early iterations of these programs where faculty or staff have preconceived notions about the ease of the software’s use. Many of the tools and administrative procedures have been changed and improved in the last few years, and that has also extended to the library’s services. It is now no longer necessary to rent or loan a disk from the library to upload software to a computer. Today, most of these tools and services typically requested by students and faculty are available through the web with Georgetown authentication.

Georgetown has a limited number of faculty and staff with the technical expertise to support a university-wide expansion of GIS without more investment in resources. Georgetown offers fewer than one dozen courses which expose students to GIS across 4 schools, namely the School of Foreign Service, the School of Continuing Studies, the McCourt School of Public Policy, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. 

A select group of faculty conduct advanced research using GIS.  Dr. Rajesh Verraraghavan  (SFS-STIA) is conducting timely research on informal settlements in India to support Covid-19 relief efforts.  Dr. Colin J. Carlson  (GHHS) is a global climate change biologist, mapping neglected zoonotic and vector-borne diseases.  Dr. Douglas A. Howard  (SFS-STIA) engages in remote sensing research working to understand the relationship between protracted refugee camps in Africa and the area’s environmental and natural resource conditions.  Dr. Jasmina Chauvin  (McDonough) studies how co-locating firms affects industry performance, and  Dr. Eric Dunford  (McCourt) uses geographic data to study armed conflict around the globe. Additional researchers across the university may utilize GIS to varying degrees within their work.

Additionally, a number of non-tenure-line and adjunct faculty at the School of Continuing Studies are experts in the application of GIS tools in various fields of professional practice. Joshua Murphy (SCS-URP) is a specialist in the use of GIS as a tool of intergovernmental coordination of climate change impacts in coastal regions at NOAA, Dr. Christopher Pyke leads the global management of building performance data at the U.S. Green Building Council, Dr. Tim Frazier is a specialist in the use of GIS in emergency management, and Uwe Brandes uses GIS in the service of sustainable development planning of urban districts. 

These pockets of faculty expertise highlight the enormous value that spatial thinking can bring for Georgetown, but these efforts largely exist outside of institutional support for GIS-enabled research. However, the institution-wide adoption of GIS research methods at Georgetown is demonstrably behind those of other R-1 universities. This is reflective of the need to provide greater geospatial research support and assistance. 

Currently, the GIS support functions across campus are fragmented, with the library supporting an oversized demand for GIS education. Many of the desktop computers across campus are also not set up with the specifications necessary for robust spatial analysis, and one of the major software systems used by students to conduct advanced spatial analysis (Esri ArcGIS Pro) does not run on Macintosh computers, which are the only workstations available at the School of Continuing Studies where many students are required to use GIS in their coursework. The development of a more robust and distributed GIS infrastructure across campus would empower more students and faculty to adopt these technologies. 

Georgetown has major opportunities for growing its GIS capacities. At the entry level, many of these hardware limitations are dissolving due to the proliferation of cloud computing which makes hardware specifications less constraining. With respect to the access to data, the  open standards through the Open GIS Consortium , an industry standards governance association with over over 500 public sector and corporate members, have opened up format sharing opportunities across tools and platforms, which offers faculty and staff more opportunities than ever to engage students and conduct research across a wide range of applications. 

Of critical significance, new students at Georgetown approach their learning experience with already-established backgrounds in data science, so more support for the application of geographic data is necessary to enable learning outcomes. Rapid advances in geo-coded data across society are rapidly raising the expectations of students and forcing new disruptions in data science. 

In terms of future organization and governance, Georgetown has dozens of labs, initiatives, and institutes which can be used as models for a future GIS center, and its industry partnerships can be strengthened by providing GIS expertise and services to its community of stakeholders. Georgetown is also generating the data knowledge needed to support the backend infrastructure of an enterprise GIS system through the Massive Data Institute. There are dozens of tertiary initiatives across campus which could collectively support and benefit from the increase in GIS capacity provided to faculty and students.

The benefits of an expanded GIS institutional infrastructure for Georgetown students and researchers are extensive, and there are many alternative approaches that have been forged at other institutions.  Dedicated research  into GIS organizational models across colleges and universities has compared the costs and benefits of alternative options. These models include library services, departmental centers, and nondepartmental centers. Beyond these models, there are additional opportunities which could be explored or combined with other, more well-established models to create an accessible, cohesive and effective GIS ecosystem across the university.

The current model at Georgetown is the library-based model, where Lauinger provides almost all of the resources across the campus. Library models tend to be interdisciplinary and provide support to students and faculty at the beginning of their GIS education. They are typically funded through the university’s budget, so their support for GIS is more sustainable than models which may be funded through grants or other soft money sources. Libraries also have a strong record of acquiring and managing spatial data and providing support in curriculum design. In addition, librarians typically offer in-class workshops and support where department-based models typically would not, and library resources on curriculum design may support disciplines in which faculty are not as familiar with GIS such as business, history, or medicine. 

Despite these benefits, the library-based model is not as well-equipped to provide long-term support for advanced GIS education and resources as a nondepartmental model, and often libraries are unable to support partnerships with external agencies and stakeholders. Libraries also tend to struggle responding to advanced, unique, or unusual GIS needs, and Digital Scholarship librarians’ generalized nature may stretch support thin across many technologies, meaning the demand for GIS services will be higher than the library’s capacity to support it. The library-based model is ideal for universities still assessing the demand for GIS amongst their faculty and student body, but as GIS needs become increasingly larger in scale and more sophisticated, a specialized model may prove to provide superior services and support as well as open up additional external opportunities.

Departmental GIS labs and centers are located within an existing school or program at the university. Typically these programs are located in geology or geography departments, but can also be located in environmental sciences and similar programs. Departmental models generally receive less funding from the regular college budget and more from special funds, grants, partnerships, and informal arrangements. This can strengthen relationships with external agencies and organizations, but may reduce the center’s sustainability over time as the budgets fluctuate. 

Departmental centers often overemphasize support for their specific school or program, and thus fail to provide appropriate workshops and services for other fields, further siloing the knowledge and failing to integrate GIS in an interdisciplinary way. Since the department primarily caters to this smaller discipline, demand for GIS across the university often exceeds capacity in the departmental model and thus the availability of services to faculty, staff, and students is compromised compared to non-departmental and library-based models. Georgetown currently lacks a single, intuitive department to host a GIS center, but could implement a GIS minor or certificate program which could be the steward. 

Establishing a stand-alone nondepartmental GIS program may be a more extensive and financially demanding model, but resources can be leveraged through the  University Consortium of Geographic Information Systems , the  Urban and Regional Information Systems Association , the  United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation , the  Esri Innovation Program , or the  National Geospatial Technology Center of Excellence , all of which develop resources and/or accreditation standards for certificate programs. 

Nondepartmental GIS centers are separate from a single academic department of school, and thus can be flexible in supporting faculty across disciplines and diffusing knowledge across the campus. These nondepartmental centers tend to provide enhanced instructional capabilities, better institutional support, and have a greater capacity to handle demand for GIS services than library-based or departmental models. 

Nondepartmental GIS centers are most likely to emerge at colleges and universities where GIS is well-established across a range of disciplines and where it would not make sense to host it in a single department, such as the  Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University . Nondepartmental GIS centers can also become service centers for researchers or outside agencies, which provides flexibility in their funding sources and strengthens relationships to the community. 

These service centers may receive funds from state or local governments, emergency management offices, and community agencies where faculty and students can provide a fee-for-service model and provide a pipeline for GIS internships and employment. This interaction with outside stakeholders may not be possible through departmental or library-based models. These centers can also focus exclusively on GIS and thus provide more advanced and specialized educational workshops or services to the campus community, but may require dedicated university funding to ensure sustainability. 

Nondepartmental centers can also establish a peer tutoring or part-time student staff model, which could be an inexpensive option for developing a robust pool of GIS support. Students with GIS knowledge can support faculty or other students who may be interested in learning more about GIS, without stretching the capacity for Digital Scholarship librarians. Based on Georgetown’s increasing demand for GIS support, a nondepartmental model may be an appropriate long-term option for expanding GIS capacity.

There are also additional opportunities to either hybridize these models or layer them depending on the available resources and demand. For example, many nondepartmental GIS centers are nested within the library infrastructure or partially funded through partnerships with other university labs or programs. The University of the District of Columbia  established a partnership  with Pennsylvania State University’s Applied Research Lab through an MOU to share resources across the universities, reducing overhead costs and strengthening academic relationships.  Most of the universities with nondepartmental centers also have GIS majors, minors, or certification programs. Each of these models can be implemented to varying degrees, whereby some aspects of any or all of these could be adopted to approach a different problem. The library can offer workshops and basic-level consultation for students while directing researchers to centers with additional resources for more advanced use cases and project development, similar to the  Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences lab  at Brown University; however, the decentralization of these resources may pose a challenge for developing and pooling resources and scaling the services. 

Many of the stakeholders interviewed for this project highlighted the opportunity to establish some form of GIS common space, such as a smaller lab, or a more broadly themed data commons where students and faculty can commingle. The establishment of these GIS Commons would be a critical component of a strong GIS foundation at Georgetown. This community of practice would connect faculty and students to projects and research, creating a larger capacity for GIS support and adoption in other disciplines. 

Within the Washington, DC Consortium of Universities, there are a variety of models employed. Georgetown University falls at the low end of the spectrum when it comes to available GIS resources and services provided to students and faculty, only offering a sparse collection of courses and library workshops. George Mason University, GW University, and Montgomery College all offer GIS programs, GIS certification, and a dedicated GIS lab at minimum. UMD and Virginia Tech both have research centers and Virginia Tech also has a GIS service center which engages students and faculty in projects with the local community.

• The existing administrative systems at Georgetown support the development of new centers, initiatives, and labs;
• Select “green shoots” of concentrated GIS adoption exist across schools, including select examples of integration into existing curricula;
• The recent development of new research initiatives (Global Cities Initiative, Massive Data Institute, McCourt Data Science and Public Policy program, the Data Ethics Lab, the Data Science and Analytics program, etc.) provides a pool of faculty and students who can be immediately engaged in building new spatial analysis capacity and new programmatic governance. The Massive Data Institute is already putting together data repositories and could immediately host a geospatial database for the university;
• Remote working and the expansion of Cloud Computing has removed many of the hardware requirements for expanding GIS capabilities;
• Georgetown has an existing license agreement with Esri, which is fully budgeted and provides extensive ArcGIS resources;
• Curriculum design and development resources are widely available for undergraduate, graduate and certification programs through university consortiums and industry associations;
• There are several faculty and researchers interested in being the champions of new GIS initiatives.

• Georgetown’s main academic focus is remarkably indifferent to spatial analysis, even though spatial research can play an enormous role in innovating traditional areas of research strength in the social sciences and qualitative research;
• There are very few tenure-line faculty whose specialty geography and no tenure-line faculty whose academic expertise is GIS analysis;
• The university’s workstations are often not equipped to run demanding GIS software. The School of Continuing Studies only has a Mac lab, which cannot run Esri ArcGIS Desktop software;
• New centers are generally funded through philanthropic gifts and thus it is challenging to initiate new demand responsive services, staffing, and goals;
• There are few faculty and researchers with skills and technical expertise specific to QGIS, ERDAS Imagine, or Esri ArcGIS products, which are in high demand in the job market.

• Lauinger Library’s workshop attendance data show a high demand for GIS across departments and disciplines;
• Georgetown’s existing license agreement with Esri allows the university to offer even more resources to students and staff for no increase in cost;
• There are many humanities and social science applications of GIS that offer a way to break down academic silos and increase the connectivity between university departments, institutions, and initiatives;
• It is easier to access free and open data and software through the web, and with Open GIS Standards the barriers to entry for learning new software have been reduced.
• Georgetown has many unique and valuable relationships with the federal government and other external partners such as Esri, which could be further strengthened by expanding GIS initiatives.
• Increased GIS resources for students and faculty would likely bring additional grants and funding into the university;
• A pool of students with an interest in GIS through Research Assistantships, Teaching Assistantships, or peer tutoring could enable additional research capacity or funding partnerships through local organizations.

• Relying on soft money sources for a GIS center or lab could create unstable and unsustainable services and fail to serve the needs of the student population and external partnerships;
• The lack of a central GIS department or lab could result in smaller, more fragmented services and result in less interdisciplinary collaboration or a limited student pool for Teaching and Research Assistantships;
• Faculty  could be hesitant  to venture into digital scholarship out of concern for how that work will be acknowledged and rewarded in existing faculty tenure and merit award systems;
• Relying solely on the library to provide GIS educational services would cut off funding opportunities from external partnerships with government, industry, or NGOs;
• Focusing on supporting one software platform (e.g. Esri ArcGIS) rather than supporting a variety of spatial analysis applications (e.g. QGIS, R, etc.) or even tool-agnostic training could result in a less-prepared workforce.

Without additional dedicated resources, Georgetown could undertake several immediate initiatives in order to catalyze GIS demand and foster greater levels of adoption:

1. Form a Georgetown GIS Users Group composed of faculty and staff. While informal coordination meetings are ongoing, a dedicated and structured working group of representative faculty and staff can advise the Library, the Provost’s Office, and UIS on emerging issues and needs faced by users. This group can also be a sounding board and advocate for new capacity-building initiatives related to technology, staffing, curricula, and pedagogy. 
2. Centralize and Actively Manage University-wide User Data. Data is collected by Lauinger Library about workshop attendance, but additional data may be collected to monitor trends in user adoption and to identify the university’s priorities. Students, graduates, and industry partners could be surveyed to determine what GIS skills are needed to become successful professionals. Together this data might be presented as a university-wide dashboard. 
3. Create a Responsive Strategic Plan. Leverage this report to create a responsive working-document to serve as a strategic plan for greater GIS adoption at Georgetown. After conducting this needs assessment, goals and objectives around GIS should be clearly articulated. These goals may include reaching new students, expanding faculty education, providing continuing education for librarians, and more. While developing these goals and objectives, an inventory of supportive faculty and financial assets should be collected to ensure that new initiatives have the resources to make an impact. New initiatives and activities to reach these goals should also have clear performance indicators and be carefully evaluated on a regular basis with defined methods in order to track adoption and measure successful or unsuccessful approaches. Any activities to reach the overarching goals could be developed in consultation with professors, program administrators, and other stakeholders who can feel ownership of a shared vision for GIS on campus and generate excitement around these new initiatives. 
4. Expand visibility of Georgetown’s existing GIS community. Short-term initiatives to expand the visibility and strength of Georgetown’s GIS user community might include supporting additional library workshops and curriculum design workshops featuring peer-completed projects, designing dedicated workshops for interested faculty, conducting targeted outreach to advertise GIS resources in additional departments or schools, adding more courses in existing programs, creating GIS awards or competitions, or reducing the barriers to web portal access of GIS software. An outreach campaign in certain programs could identify future faculty or student interest and begin to shift the academic culture towards embracing more spatial thinking. Another project could be a joint effort between the library and other departments to create a digital collection of GIS projects held in a public-facing repository. The stewardship of this repository could eventually be transferred to a GIS center. 
5. Introduce a GIS Certificate at SCS. SCS is introducing several credit-bearing professional development certificates in the field of data science. Creating a GIS certificate at SCS would create a demand-driven vehicle to leverage Georgetown’s expertise in delivering professional education. A for-credit certificate structure would in some cases enable existing students to get partial academic credit in their work towards other degrees at Georgetown. Faculty and staff at Georgetown would be able to pursue this training using their education benefits. Developing a GIS certificate at SCS would also position Georgetown to directly engage additional GIS practitioners as course instructors. 
6. Critically assess existing pedagogy and curricula. Some interviewees noted that the sparsity of GIS course offerings makes it difficult to set up and enforce prerequisites, which can affect the amount of time professors are able to spend on more advanced material. Developing additional support for multiple course sections or offerings across departments would also lead to a better understanding of the demand for GIS across different programs and academic levels. Many of the longer-term strategies rely on a physical space where students and faculty can work through projects, ask questions, and generally connect through their passion for GIS. In order to generate excitement and assess space needs, temporary popup spaces in the library or through a lab such as the Massive Data Institute could be a short-term stepping stone towards the ultimate goal of a GIS lab. Professors could sit with students and walk them through problems or receive curriculum support, and researchers could identify students interested in supporting projects and assignments. Without a central space to meet up, generating an interdisciplinary culture of GIS would be a challenge. A dedicated lab space within the existing social infrastructure of Georgetown would start to develop this collaboration.
7. Foster More External Collaboration and Partnerships. The Urban & Regional Planning program has recently fostered a partnership with Esri to explore the use of new software extensions in course instruction. This is just one example of many other kinds of external partnerships which would benefit faculty and students without the need for significant additional resources. Other partnerships might be with research, government or other technology organizations. 
8. Hire a Dedicated University-wide GIS Coordinator. Leverage existing resources within the Library and in individual programs to empower a single coordinator to serve as the convenor of the GIS Working Group and lead advocate for future university resources. This position would likely best be housed within the Massive Data Institute and could play an ongoing liaison role between motivated stakeholders across all schools and departments. This position would best be a blend of administrative, training, and research responsibilities and might even extend to being “chief evangelist” of the power and significance of spatial analysis at Georgetown.

The short-term strategies outlined above can feed directly into new activities which require additional dedicated resources. Over time, Georgetown can easily build a robust ecosystem of GIS services and support for the entire Georgetown community. A longer-term development plan would identify concrete actions which build new data infrastructure, program support, and budgets required for broader GIS adoption at Georgetown.

1. Introduce Dedicated GIS Hubs Across Campus. Create multiple locations across all campuses where students can directly access high-performing GIS hardware and software. This is a goal that has been expressed by many faculty as key to advancing greater GIS adoption in their departments. In some cases, these hubs will be ideal for also conducting in-person GIS instruction and in other periods of time, these centers can be a strategic way of advancing a community of practice and learning. It should be noted that a healthy and cross-disciplinary ecosystem of GIS at Georgetown would benefit from a centralized GIS lab versus these decentralized hubs, which can become fragmented and siloed. These hubs are a more achievable interim step towards consolidating resources into a single lab. 
2. Establish Georgetown as a GIS Data Intermediary. Georgetown is in a unique position to establish a data intermediary. Intermediaries, as opposed to data warehouses, not only store and manage data but also assist data users in navigating barriers to access. Data intermediaries are often used by researchers and government stakeholders to navigate the legal, technical, and political governance issues around accessing unique or sensitive data. Georgetown could aggregate, transform, maintain, and provision spatial data for students, faculty, and external partners. The Massive Data Institute has faculty researchers qualified to develop the security protocols and access procedures for this data. 
3. Establish a Dedicated GIS Research Lab. The main strategy recommended for adoption is the creation of a nondepartmental GIS Ethics Lab. A lab could reach out across disciplines and expand the offerings at the library as well as leverage UIS and other departments or initiatives such as the Georgetown Global Cities Initiative, the Massive Data Institute, the Data Ethics Lab, the School of Foreign Service, the School of Continuing Studies, and more. Labs also provide valuable marketing opportunities for new students and external partners. Government agencies, nonprofits, and private sector partners can support the lab financially in exchange for partnerships with the university to provide GIS services or train interns on GIS software. The McCourt School of Public Policy could provide spatial statistics courses incorporating programming languages such as R or Python, while the Science, Technology, and International Affairs program could offer remote sensing software training for students in other schools, like the Emergency and Disaster Management program at the School of Continuing Studies. Creating a lab is also important because the library is currently not in a position to provide enterprise-level systems and robust software support for a variety of GIS tools and applications. Enterprise servers are important for certain fields, such as medicine. Medical schools across the region have invested in GIS enterprise systems because many of the current web-based offerings are not HIPAA compliant. GIS practitioners cannot share patient data in the cloud, they have to do it behind a firewall. The other reason an enterprise server would be valuable is for the scalability of data. Remote sensing data sets often include thousands of imagery files which can break web-based applications. A geographic data repository would cut down analysis time when dealing with thousands of records and images. A central lab where this server and data repository can be stored and maintained would be beneficial to many different departments and schools across the campus. However, Georgetown’s Jesuit mission and focus on public service suggest that a GIS ethics lab would generate significant value-add and position the university to offer an unprecedented educational experience. Spatial data presents unique analysis challenges. Political, economic, and military applications of spatial analysis illustrate that there are significant ethical considerations to be explored. GIS practitioners must understand how projections, coordinate systems, imprecision, uncertainty, inaccuracy, and autocorrelation  affect spatial analysis  and the decisions made with these analyses. Geospatial data science and ethics are required to move beyond understanding GIS as simply a neutral tool and learn to think of geographic data critically through an ethical lens. GIS’ development has been  largely paid for through Defense funding  and has been used in surveillance,  determining where policing should be most concentrated , and where to exploit market vulnerabilities ( such as siting new payday loan stores near low-income neighborhoods ). On the other hand, GIS can be used to distribute resources equitably, direct development of new affordable housing, identify areas at high risk for climate change, and more. Concern with individuals and communities affected by these choices is an important and necessary exercise in a holistic GIS approach. At Georgetown, labs and centers are often funded through gifts to the university, but this model for funding may not support long-term support for GIS activities and programming. One option is to utilize the lab to generate resources and provide services which would benefit other centers and initiatives across the university and have a truly interdisciplinary center. Overheads for the lab could be paid for through partnerships with the Massive Data Institute, the Georgetown Global Cities Initiative, the Data Ethics Lab, the Law Center, the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, the School of Medicine, the Georgetown Climate Center, and more to generate consistent funding. The lab could support research faculty in these units by generating maps, providing training, and loaning Research Assistants to their partners. 
4. Foster Long-term External Partnerships. To lower the overall cost, external partnerships with local and federal groups could also assist in funding core services. Many students are interested in working for the federal government, so partnerships with these federal agencies would facilitate student interest toward public service. For example, tThe  University of New Hampshire’s Geospatial Science Center  provides private consultations and acts as the state clearinghouse for geospatial data, and Pennsylvania State University manages the  Pennsylvania Spatial Data Access  state geospatial data clearinghouse. Georgetown, through partnerships with DC government or federal agencies, could provide similar services in exchange for more dedicated funding streams. Establishing the lab may require a one-time contribution that could be pursued through various grants and partnerships. The National Science Foundation has contributed over $3.7 million to spatial research through their  Human-Environment and Geographical Sciences Program . The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation recently developed the  Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities initiative , which is interested in establishing multidisciplinary research programs around generating insights into urban conditions. They have provided over $36 million to date funding different research programs on urbanism, including several grants to establish or support spatial research at  Columbia ,  Princeton ,  UCLA ,  Berkeley , and  Cornell . With a rise in climate change, many foundations (including the Ford Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation) are all investing millions of dollars into spatial and climate research. These and additional grants could be leveraged to initiate the lab, and then a more permanent partnership or service model could sustain it. External partnerships could provide more benefits than just financial. Instituting permanent relationships with organizations and companies working with spatial data could provide cutting-edge software benefits to the student body and faculty researchers. For example, the Urban & Regional Planning program at the School of Continuing Studies recently partnered with Esri to develop curriculum around the ArcGIS Urban tool, a newly-developed application which provided a rare and powerful opportunity for students and faculty to learn and leverage this new tool for innovative place-based analysis. Partnerships with Esri and other companies can develop new value for the Georgetown community through these unique opportunities.
5. Expand the Spatial Analysis Curriculum. Develop a curricular review process in partnership with the Red House, Global Cities Initiative, and MDI in order for faculty and administrators to conceptualize revisions to program curricula across all schools at Georgetown. This process would follow other well-developed practices of change management which have already been fostered by the Red House. 
6. Expand a Dedicated Pool of Research Expertise. Through these activities, staff and advisory committees would be identified to facilitate program or center infrastructure, safe technology policies, software access protocols, and more. Gaps in staff or faculty knowledge will be identified to hire qualified GIS and IT support staff for loading and updating software, providing security, training new staff, students, and professors, maintaining a GIS lab, and providing guidance on curriculum development.

 GIS Instructional Resources 

 Syllabi Repository  

 GeoTech Center Model Courses  

 Developing a GTCM Modeled Geospatial Program  

 USGIF Educational Programs 

 Developing and Sustaining Geospatial Programs in Community Colleges  

 UCGIS 

 GEOINT Essential Body of Knowledge   

 UCGIS Body of Knowledge 

 URISA Colleges and Universities  

 University Consortium for Geographic Information Science Institutional Members